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Google I/O 2011: Google Vies for Dominance on Desktop and Device Alike
| May 13, 2011 | Collaboration Platforms
| Analyst: Brad Shimmin
Event Summary
May 11, 2011 -- During its annual developers conference, Google announced the upcoming release of its first Chromebooks from partners Samsung and Acer. Chromebooks will be available online June 15 in the U.S., the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain. More countries will follow in the coming months. Chromebooks will be available in the U.S. from Amazon and Best Buy and internationally from leading retailers. Google also discussed its next version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich, which is slated to deliver one operating system that works everywhere, regardless of device. Google also launched a music streaming/storage service and discussed future plans to expand the Android platform with Android@Home.
Quick Take
Analytical Summary
• Current Perspective: Positive on the various announcements Google made during its annual developer conference, Google I/O, because the company demonstrated its continuing ability to engineer both enterprise- and consumer-focused solutions capable of generating an instant market impact. Thanks to an immense development community, a currently dominant mobile OS (Android), a seemingly limitless compute architecture upon which to build, and a current market trend to cloud-based collaboration services, Google is poised to influence the enterprise marketplace with a solution that covers both device and back-end services.
• Vendor Importance: Very high to Google, because the Google I/O conference stands as the company's premier, yearly mouthpiece through which it trumpets past accomplishments and heralds future objectives. This year's show holds particular importance, given Google's recent executive shakeup and the recent meteoric rise of the Android mobile operating system and its associated ecosystem. Google had to convey a strong sense of corporate direction, given its new leadership organization, and it needed to rein in some control over Android in order to check fragmentation, while simultaneously expanding its scope in order to realize new market opportunities.
• Market Impact: Moderate on the collaboration platform marketplace, because while Google's many announcements during Google I/O conveyed a strong sense of corporate direction and outlined a controlled yet even more expansive role for Android, the company did not make any moves capable of directly altering current market dynamics. If anything, the vendor left a number of opportunities on the table: for example, failing to bundle in Google Apps licenses with its forthcoming Chromebook release. Similarly, the vendor did not reinvigorate its previous efforts to capture the enterprise social networking space (Google Wave); nor did it introduce any new capabilities aimed at tying its various productivity tools together via social and collaborative functions.
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A new kind of computer: Chromebook
5/11/2011 10:43:00 AM
A little less than two years ago we set out to make computers much better. Today, we’re announcing the first Chromebooks from our partners, Samsung and Acer. These are not typical notebooks. With a Chromebook you won’t wait minutes for your computer to boot and browser to start. You’ll be reading your email in seconds. Thanks to automatic updates the software on your Chromebook will get faster over time. Your apps, games, photos, music, movies and documents will be accessible wherever you are and you won't need to worry about losing your computer or forgetting to back up files. Chromebooks will last a day of use on a single charge, so you don’t need to carry a power cord everywhere. And with optional 3G, just like your phone, you’ll have the web when you need it. Chromebooks have many layers of security built in so there is no anti-virus software to buy and maintain. Even more importantly, you won't spend hours fighting your computer to set it up and keep it up to date.
At the core of each Chromebook is the Chrome web browser. The web has millions of applications and billions of users. Trying a new application or sharing it with friends is as easy as clicking a link. A world of information can be searched instantly and developers can embed and mash-up applications to create new products and services. The web is on just about every computing device made, from phones to TVs, and has the broadest reach of any platform. With HTML5 and other open standards, web applications will soon be able to do anything traditional applications can do, and more.
Chromebooks will be available online June 15 in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Spain. More countries will follow in the coming months. In the U.S., Chromebooks will be available from Amazon and Best Buy and internationally from leading retailers.
Even with dedicated IT departments, businesses and schools struggle with the same complex, costly and insecure computers as the rest of us. To address this, we’re also announcing Chromebooks for Business and Education. This service from Google includes Chromebooks and a cloud management console to remotely administer and manage users, devices, applications and policies. Also included is enterprise-level support, device warranties and replacements as well as regular hardware refreshes. Monthly subscriptions will start at $28/user for businesses and $20/user for schools.
There are over 160 million active users of Chrome today. Chromebooks bring you all of Chrome's speed, simplicity and security without the headaches of operating systems designed 20 to 30 years ago. We're very proud of what the Chrome team along with our partners have built, and with seamless updates, it will just keep getting better.
Android: momentum, mobile and more at Google I/O
5/10/2011 10:00:00 AM
This morning at Google I/O, the Android team shared some updates. It’s hard to believe a little more than two and a half years ago, we were just one device, launching in one country, on one carrier. Thanks to the ecosystem of manufacturers, developers and carriers, the platform has grown exponentially. There are now:
100 million activated Android devices
400,000 new Android devices activated every day
200,000 free and paid applications available in Android Market
4.5 billion applications installed from Android Market
Mobile—one OS everywhere
Over the past two and a half years, we’ve shipped eight releases of Android and there are now more than 310 Android devices around the world, of all shapes and sizes. This morning we talked about our next version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich. Our goal with Ice Cream Sandwich is to deliver one operating system that works everywhere, regardless of device. Ice Cream Sandwich will bring everything you love about Honeycomb on your tablet to your phone, including the holographic user interface, more multitasking, the new launcher and richer widgets.
We also launched Music Beta by Google, a new service that lets you upload your personal music collection to the cloud for streaming to your computer and Android devices. With the new service, your music and playlists are automatically kept in sync, so if you create a new playlist on your phone, it’s instantly available on your computer or tablet. You can use a feature called Instant Mix to create a playlist of songs that go well together. You can even listen to music when you’re offline: we automatically store your most recently played music on your Android device and you can choose to make specific albums or playlists available when you’re not connected. The service is launching in beta today to U.S. users and is available by invitation.
We’ve also added Movies for rent to Android Market. You can choose to rent from thousands of movies starting at $1.99 and have them available across your Android devices—rent a movie on your home computer, and it’ll be available for viewing on your tablet or phone. You can rent from Android Market on the web today, and we’ll be rolling out an update to Verizon XOOM customers beginning today. We’ll start rolling out the update to Android 2.2 and above devices in the coming weeks.
The Android ecosystem has been moving really fast over the last two and a half years and rapid iteration on new and highly-requested features has been a driving force behind Android’s success. But of course that innovation only matters if it reaches consumers. So today we’re announcing that a founding team of industry leaders, including many from the Open Handset Alliance, are working together to adopt guidelines for how quickly devices are updated after a new platform release, and also for how long they will continue to be updated. The founding partners are Verizon, HTC, Samsung, Sprint, Sony Ericsson, LG, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Motorola and AT&T, and we welcome others to join us. To start, we're jointly announcing that new devices from participating partners will receive the latest Android platform upgrades for 18 months after the device is first released, as long as the hardware allows...and that's just the beginning. Stay tuned for more details.
From the beginning, Android was designed to extend beyond the mobile phone. With that in mind, we’ve developed Android Open Accessory to help developers start building new hardware accessories that will work across all Android devices. We previewed an initiative called Android@Home, which allows Android apps to discover, connect and communicate with appliances and devices in your home. We also showed a preview of Project Tungsten, an Android device for Music Beta to give you more control over music playback within the Android@Home network.
You can watch the entire Android keynote from Google I/O on our Google Developer YouTube Channel shortly. On behalf of the team, we want to thank the entire Android community of developers, OEMs and carriers who are pushing the platform into new areas and building great experiences for consumers. Without you, the Android platform wouldn’t have grown so large in the past two and a half years. We look forward to seeing where you take it next.
Source: Google
